Diablo 3 GAH and RMAH messed up real good, economy has been destroyed!.

Massive gold dupe bug found on RMAH. Put up a sale, take it down, get double money.

Trillions and Trillions of Gold were made in a few hours, the GAH was cleared of all the best items, gems, and crafting mats, relisted at extrodinary prices (100s of millions for some gems.) As the ultra wealthy ramped up prices, and bought anything that could be sold. Trillions of Gold exchanged hands over several hours, through the use of the AH. Exploiters saturated the markets dumping ill gotten gold throughout the US server, as prices rose, people followed suit, legit players matching the current rates saw hundreds of millions poured back to them for their efforts.

There has been no released information on the amount of Gold created, or how saturated the Gold is now in the market. But one thing is for sure, the little bug has caused the value of gold to drop hundreds of times over, 40B today is akin to 40M yesterday. The damage has been done, and serves as quite the bloody nose for Blizzards D3 on the eve of the 1 year anniversary.

(I personally made well over 200Billion yesterday selling Gems, at one point they were selling for 200 million a pop.)

The AH has since been offlined (both GAH and RMAH) Blizzard has announced people that can be seen duping will be banned, there will be no roll back. So people like me who didn't cheat, but took advantage of the overly saturated market make out like bandits, and likely thousands of others are in the same boat.

The winner here...Blizzard, it is ok to have 400Trillion Gold...as long as you buy it for 25 cents/million from the RMAH.

I haven't ever played D3 but it sounds like a rollback should have been considered. Then again 24 hours could be alot of gameplay loss for potentially innocent players who were just questing/grinding/raiding/whatever d3 players do.

So Blizzard created it's own EQ Beta vendor event due to their own greed. Can't say they didn't have it coming. Kind of a tough situation though. Ban players, many of which would likely be innocent, or royally **** the economy?

Seriously though, what a **** up this is going to be. I hope something can be done because I would feel really sorry for the legitimate players who didn't know of this, and are sitting on thier small amounts of gold (worth pennies now), will never be able to even afford crap stuff, let alone anything actually good as far as weapons and armor upgrades.

Bliz says they're going to make changes to individual accounts, and claim the actual effects were relatively low. But considering this bug seems to have been live for at least 12 hours, and came in on top of a increase in the gold cap from 1 mil to 10 mil, I have trouble believing that. Even if the number of players exploiting it was very low, it's hard to believe all that gold didn't very quickly transfer to other players like Rdm.

If everyone using the exploit was buying the absolute best stuff for their characters, and everyone else was pricing things relative to the new market reality (and why wouldn't you), then it seems fairly obvious that a lot of people are going to have WAY more gold than they should.

And let's not forget that the arbitrary removal of all the best items from the economy, having been purchased by exploiters, is going to be an issue as well. I would imagine that most of these items aren't sitting around in great numbers, if they are actually going to go for a lot of gold. It's not like in a game with crafting, where the price of production will factor into the sell price...

Meh, I feel bad for the players. I'm also not surprised at all, unfortunately.

They never bring back the AH at all. They said they regret having one. Then bump up drop rates so it's fun to get your own sets of gear rather than getting ****** grinding, and hoping for a deal on the AH.

Not that I care, I have not had the urge to play it for months.

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An old silent pond... A frog jumps into the pond, splash! Silence again.

I'm actually fairly interested in the PlayStation release. No forced online, no AH, local co-op. It's a game that would be fun to play with friends. I assume that by not having the AH, they're going to have to improve the itemization. I don't know if they'd carry that change over to the PC. They've already said that they're not carrying over the controller support or AH elimination.

What's interesting about the duplication bug is it allegedly came about as an overflow error.

It used to be that when buying gold off of the Real Money Auction House, you would buy it in stacks of 1 million each. The latest patch bumped this up to stacks of 10 million. There is a price floor of $.25 per stack, and a maximum price of $250 total sold.

Since the lowest the price could go was $.25 a stack, before the patch the most people could sell at one time was 1 billion gold for $250, and after the patch it was 10 billion for $250. The bug comes into play here. Blizzard never expected people to be selling amounts that high, and in the coding they made the variable that stores the amount of gold to be sold an integer. In computer science, when you tell the computer to store a number, you also have to tell it how much space to set aside. Normally a number of the "int" or integer type is sufficient space, but it does have upper limits. That upper limit is exactly 2^31, or 2,147,483,648. This just happens to be less than the 10 billion players were now able to post.

Weird sh*t happens when a number gets bigger than the space set aside for it, and that's called an overflow error. In old school RPGs, if your attack caused an overflow error, instead of doing an insane amount of damage it could loop back around and deal very little or even negative damage. What happened here in Diablo was the Auction House would only subtract from the player 2^31 gold, but then cancelling would return the full 10 billion or whatever greater than 2 billion number you put in.

Repeat a few times, and you had players making trillions as the economy promptly blew up. It all could have been avoided in multiple ways, too - not making the change so late in the patch cycle that the QA team did not get a chance to test it out (an experienced tester would have found this error within an afternoon), allowing AH testing on the PTR, or just not doing lazy coding like that.

What's interesting about the duplication bug is it allegedly came about as an overflow error.

It used to be that when buying gold off of the Real Money Auction House, you would buy it in stacks of 1 million each. The latest patch bumped this up to stacks of 10 million. There is a price floor of $.25 per stack, and a maximum price of $250 total sold.

Since the lowest the price could go was $.25 a stack, before the patch the most people could sell at one time was 1 billion gold for $250, and after the patch it was 10 billion for $250. The bug comes into play here. Blizzard never expected people to be selling amounts that high, and in the coding they made the variable that stores the amount of gold to be sold an integer. In computer science, when you tell the computer to store a number, you also have to tell it how much space to set aside. Normally a number of the "int" or integer type is sufficient space, but it does have upper limits. That upper limit is exactly 2^31, or 2,147,483,648. This just happens to be less than the 10 billion players were now able to post.

Weird sh*t happens when a number gets bigger than the space set aside for it, and that's called an overflow error. In old school RPGs, if your attack caused an overflow error, instead of doing an insane amount of damage it could loop back around and deal very little or even negative damage. What happened here in Diablo was the Auction House would only subtract from the player 2^31 gold, but then cancelling would return the full 10 billion or whatever greater than 2 billion number you put in.

Repeat a few times, and you had players making trillions as the economy promptly blew up. It all could have been avoided in multiple ways, too - not making the change so late in the patch cycle that the QA team did not get a chance to test it out (an experienced tester would have found this error within an afternoon), allowing AH testing on the PTR, or just not doing lazy coding like that.

Edited, May 11th 2013 9:53am by IDrownFish

****, you don't even have to be experienced. This is like a basic checklist issue. Check your gold, post an auction, check your gold, cancel an auction, check your gold, post your auction, sell the auction, check your gold.

That's it. You're done. You've found the bug. And it's not like this was something crazy to check. I'm amazed they don't have a script that will do it. And if they don't have a tester assigned to specifically test all functions of the auction house with each patch, then I judge them even harder for implementing it in the first place.

Blizzard has sated that the RMAH transactions and Battle.Net Balances of the now banned accounts will be donated to charity. No word on the other accounts who made RMAH purchases. Many forum posters claiming that their battle.net balances have been purged, one guy claims to have had $122 removed from his account, yet has not been suspended or banned. Others state there have been charge backs from paypals, with no funds returned.

It seems as if Blizzard just took all monies from the RMAH sales from GoldGate. I can understand the people who took advantage of the exploit having assets confiscated, but why the people who were just playing the market game and happened to make some money.

Yeah, taking advantage of people taking advantage of the exploit seems like it's a different monster. At the very least, I don't know where you draw the line.

I mean, the majority of these people would have had no clue about the exploit and have just noticed the prices were huge. I would have figured it was someone trying to aggressively corner the market, not someone exploiting.

The thing that boggles my mind is how Blizzard could have taken so long to catch this. I mean, 6 hours is a LONG time for something like this. Are they seriously operating a RMT AH with such lax monitoring?

Weird sh*t happens when a number gets bigger than the space set aside for it, and that's called an overflow error. In old school RPGs, if your attack caused an overflow error, instead of doing an insane amount of damage it could loop back around and deal very little or even negative damage. What happened here in Diablo was the Auction House would only subtract from the player 2^31 gold, but then cancelling would return the full 10 billion or whatever greater than 2 billion number you put in.

If I recall, one of the most famous overflow errors was from Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, where your companion could heal the final boss for more damage than your attacks. I believe it was even possible with buff spells to make it roll around a second time back into healing.

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Beohrn -- 85 druid Brandmanen -- 85 Hunter

"Skill is a measure of how fast a player can turn experience into competence." -- Anedris, EJ forums "The warrior acts, the fool reacts"

Please pardon the ego, it keeps getting stuck in doorways. I'm working on it.